A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  The Storys were leaders of an American colony in Rome and it was at one of their musical evenings the following year (1883) that Ernest met the young American girl he was to marry.

  Lucy Tracy Lee, whom everyone called Luie, had passed much of her childhood and adolescence at Ondeora, the family farmhouse in Highland Falls, a large estate near the American military academy, West Point, in upstate New York. These early years were radiantly happy. There were parties and picnics and tennis and dances (at which it didn’t matter if you fell over) and hilarious amateur theatricals and, above all, riding her beloved pony all over the country. But when she was aged thirteen her father suddenly died and, to help Luie overcome her grief, her cousin, the financier Pierpont Morgan, took her away for a six-week tour of England and France with his daughter Louisa (Luie’s closest friend). They had embarked on the White Star Liner Britannic shortly before Easter 1879 and passed much of their time shopping in London and Paris. ‘Cousin Pierpont’, Luie decided, ‘is certainly the dearest, kindest man in this whole world.’

  She was a naturally happy young girl, lively and good-hearted, and she became ‘an almost legendary figure of perfection to our generation’, one of her younger cousins remembered. ‘All the little events of her life were kept polished as precious relics.’ She was an only child, perhaps rather spoilt by her mother, sometimes a little lonely and increasingly bewildered by the prospect of life before her. As she grew up, a spirit of discontent began to rise within her. So many things that had pleased her just a year or two before now bored her in this ‘quiet stupid life at West Point’. In the autumn of 1881, at the age of seventeen, she began keeping a journal to record ‘how the world goes with me, so that these pages may bring back some of the pleasant times as well as the bitter’. She remembered with pleasure and an aftertaste of bitterness her journey to England: ‘How much better and more easily one can live in Europe than … in this horrid little out of the way place.’ She was surprised to learn that some of the Highland Falls community thought her affected – and then she decided to take this as a compliment. ‘I was, I know myself, very, very English,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘and did not care, or was rather pleased.’ She found this stiff English manner useful when meeting people she disliked. It concealed her vulnerability.

  Luie was not what connoisseurs like Ernest would have rated a professional beauty. ‘I do not think I have the first element of a belle,’ she noted in her journal. Yet people were strongly attracted to her. Her vitality was especially winning. She was tall and athletically built, had blue eyes and long horizontal eyebrows that gave the upper part of her face a mature look beyond her years. ‘They say I am old enough to be 21,’ she wrote while still seventeen, ‘and I certainly feel old enough to be any age that people choose to call me.’ Her mouth was like a baby’s, but the line to her chin gave an impression of determination – and, being highly strung and of a romantic temperament, she needed determination to navigate the difficult passage that lay ahead. Living with her mother and grandfather, and with poignant memories of her recently dead father, she seemed poised between ‘happy, happy times past and the sad days to come’. Uncertainties crowded in on her. ‘Oh, I wonder, I wonder, I wonder! How will all this end? Love and pain go hand in hand as do emotions and tears in a maid of seventeen, Uncle Charlie says.’

  Her heart and mind appeared to be in constant conflict. She was not unambitious. ‘Later in my life I may be thrown with people who will be historical,’ she predicted. ‘I should hate to be a wallflower.’ At the same time she was possessed by ‘a most uncomfortable longing for I don’t know what. Something unattainable.’ She was horrified to hear that some people considered her a flirt. And how was she to solve the painful mystery of men? On her seventeenth birthday, she had received her first proposal of marriage: and was revolted by the memory of it. ‘If all the rest I have in my life are as thoroughly disagreeable to me as that one was I shall surely remain in the virgin state until the end of my days,’ she decided. ‘ … I thought it perfectly disgusting … I could hardly endure the sight of him afterwards.’ She had one or two men friends who were ‘a very good influence on me I think, but I do not mean so much morally as mentally’. Yet none of them really excited or attracted her – until she met Henry McVicker. ‘He fascinated me more in half an hour … than any other man I think I have ever met,’ she admitted. ‘ … He is good looking, almost handsome, with round black eyes and an awfully good figure, very tall and nice … How easily a maid of seventeen is won. He aroused all my most intense emotions … I was fascinated and felt that he too was just, oh so little, but still a little fascinated too! But he is so much of a flirt, I could not imagine whether he meant a quarter of what he said then or afterwards …’ She continued seeing him until their meetings began to cause her Aunt Kitty so much alarm that she was obliged to speak very sternly to Mr McVicker, making him so angry that he left the house. And then Aunt Kitty explained to Luie that he probably did like her very much but that he was a womaniser who amused himself at young ladies’ expense. After that Cousin Pierpont, who had become like a father to her since her own father’s death, told her that he felt ‘quite provoked at my going out so much and at my being allowed to know Mr McVicker who … is a scelerat [villain]. I suppose he knows, but still no one seems to think him so … They say he is not nearly as bad as his sisters but – that might easily be true and he not at all moral.’ It was perplexing and she felt rather angry with everyone. But she did not forget Henry McVicker. ‘I wonder what he really did mean … To me he is a perfect enigma.’

  For the first time Luie began to reflect that a simple moral compass might not after all direct her to the right man for marrying. Perhaps ‘a man who has been wild and then really loves a pure, true woman, will make a far better husband than one who has never had any great temptations and has seen but little or nothing of a world which women, true women, should know positively nothing about’. Knowing and experiencing so little herself, she started observing engaged couples, trying to tell whether they were marrying for love, money or position. And she examined the behaviour of married couples such as ‘a most amusing woman married to a German Baron whom she hates while the poor man adores her. She treats him horribly and he looks so very sad. It is a horrible state of things, these people who do not care one bit for each other and are yet tied together for life.’

  How could she be certain of avoiding such ties herself? Was she a pure, true woman any more, with this new liking she had developed for men with a taste of excitement in their lives? ‘I do not think we love people because they have few faults,’ she reasoned. A year earlier, at the age of sixteen, she would not have believed it possible to be lost in such a complex sexual-moral maze. ‘I wonder if life always disappoints one as mine has lately. If I could only learn not to set my heart on anything … perhaps we make our own disappointments … I do think life is not worth living and if one could give up the struggle I think it would be a relief … I know sometime that this dreadful longing and sorrow will be over & I shall care again for someone in the years to come but now it is all so hard … When I am left alone I just cry my eyes out … I don’t think I care for a soul besides Mamma in this world … I feel horribly restless and wish I could get rid of that constant trying companion, Self.’

  Her melancholy was intensified by the death of her grandfather who lived with them at Highland Falls. She had been very fond of him; and she had seen him die. Once again Pierpont Morgan stepped forward and suggested taking Luie, her mother and aunt off for a tour of Europe and North Africa. But this time he planned for them to be abroad much longer – perhaps for as long as two years.

  This plan provoked a crisis in Luie, turning upside down many of her thoughts. ‘It is a dreadful break and there will be some chains that will be very very hard to unclasp,’ she wrote. The ‘quiet stupid life’ at West Point seemed painfully desirable to her now that she was leaving it – there was a man she had recently met whom she particularly liked and
now she would never know whether he liked her. Was it possible to wait two years to find out? It seemed a lifetime. Saying goodbye to him would be awful (he came to the boat when she embarked bringing her flowers). How would she ever find the right man in England – that stiff, cold, formal country she had so admired when she was young and innocent? In those early days she had seen everything au couleur de rose. Now she recalled those empty words the English used over and over again – effusions of hot air over a sterile land: ‘really’, ‘certainly’, ‘indeed’ and ‘Oh’ and then ‘Ah’. She had been taught French in America, but none of the other European languages. It seemed her only friends, as she travelled from one country to another, would be her favourite authors, such as Susan Coolidge, the children’s author who chronicled the exciting adventures of What Katy Did. (In What Katy Did Next she went on a European tour and met a handsome naval captain whom she was destined to marry.)

  In December 1881 Luie wrote a despairing farewell message in her journal: ‘A week from today we sail and when I think of it, it seems too dreadful, too dreadful … I dread and yet am utterly indifferent to this coming week … Everyone and everything bores me … I don’t think I am worth one thought or care or in fact anything. I am not of any use. There is absolutely nothing to me – and oh dear I wish I felt young.’

  Once they had reached Europe and began their long itinerary, Luie’s melancholy lifted a little. In Paris and London she went shopping but ‘dresses by the dozen are not so interesting as I had fondly hoped and standing to be fitted is the most tedious thing one can do’. More successful were her visits to the art galleries. She listed the paintings that most pleased her: Romney’s Lady Hamilton, Gainsborough’s Mrs Siddons and Joshua Reynolds’s Age of Innocence in London; Rosa Bonheur’s landscape of oxen ploughing seen against distant green hills, Dernier Jour de la Captivité de Madame Rolland by Goupil in Paris. She seems to have been drawn to pictures with a strong appeal to the emotions.

  Pierpont Morgan, who accompanied them during these first months, gave Luie many presents, filling her rooms with flowers and bonbons. He ‘is perfectly lovely to us … He has thought of everything to make us happy … He is so much to me.’ This was all she had once longed for: so why was she not happier? If only Pierpont Morgan had been someone else, someone her own age … But what awful thoughts these were! She deserved to be punished. ‘I think if I were shut up in a room and endured solitary confinement I should be more agreeable after it.’

  They went by train from Paris to Marseilles and sailed down the Mediterranean towards Alexandria in a ‘dirty, nasty, vile, unreliable, disgusting smelling, uncomfortable & beastly boat … a horrid old tub called the Alphée’. Even so, the first few days of their cruise were extraordinarily beautiful, passing Corsica and the Island of Monte Cristo, then on between Capri and Ischia, and the exquisite Bay of Naples – ‘there cannot be in the world anything more beautiful than that Bay,’ she wrote. But driving helter-skelter through Naples itself she was appalled: ‘in the dirty smelling town one would wish to die only to get rid of the discomfort. I never want to go back to Naples … A boat full of people came to the ship and sang to guitars and mandolins, but I think the songs, though musical, were most doubtful in sentiment.’

  Egypt, however, was unexpectedly exciting, particularly Cairo. The people were so handsome. Their robes seemed fastened by some supernatural power (there was no sign of hooks or buttons). The beauty of these Arabs astonished her – the men were ‘superb’, the children in their red, yellow, blue and brown clothes so vivid and cunning. The women were all veiled, yet their eyes glowed through the enticingly thin fabric. And everywhere, through the streets and amid the orange groves, along the canals and in the doorways of the mud huts, men, women and children jostled with the donkeys, camels, sheep and goats in an endless traffic of life, which absorbed her so that she began to forget her unhappy self.

  When Pierpont Morgan left the party, Luie was escorted to official dinners, Muslim processions and evenings of Arabian music by the composer Arthur Sullivan who was enjoying three months’ holiday in Egypt. ‘Mr Sullivan has been lovely to me and really all my pleasure has come through him,’ she wrote in her journal. But he was even more devoted to a pretty young girl called Emma Colvin. Luie noted that ‘English men are very familiar I think with all women, a strange thing to me; we have so little of it at home …’. She could not make up her mind which culture she preferred. To Arthur Sullivan she appeared delightful but also rather strange: sometimes haughty, over-fastidious and always extremely frank. She had greatly enjoyed the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas she had been taken to in New York, but hated an opéra bouffe they saw in Cairo – ‘a nasty, horrid piece and improper, though the music is most pretty’. And she was not pleased with the ‘so-called dancing Dervishes’ who twisted their necks most fearfully as they jumped in the air, all the time howling and uttering grunts and moans: ‘anything more utterly horrible I never imagined.’

  To her surprise, Luie became known in Cairo as ‘la Belle Américaine’. A number of men told her they were ‘wild about my looks’ and that there were others desperate to meet her. But she protested: ‘I am not a beauty.’ Being praised for her beauty – while often feeling so ugly – gave rise to a strange tension within her. Perhaps it was that very sheen of unhappiness that gave her face its mysterious beauty. She wanted to be praised for other attributes: for her imagination, her aristocratic bearing and ‘personal magnetism’ (which in a later age might have been called her ‘sex appeal’).

  They continued their journey on to Beirut, Damascus, Smyrna, Constantinople and Athens, spent some months in Florence and among the Italian lakes, prepared for a long stay in Paris and eventually came to Rome. If only Luie could have put all this travel into some bank, spending it in instalments between periods at home in America, it would have been perfect. But this was her sentimental education and almost in spite of herself she was beginning to look forward rather than back. Her mother and aunt had decided not to return to the United States but to settle in Rome among the American colony there – much to the disgust of their friends in Highland Falls. ‘The two old girls’, one of their American cousins later wrote, ‘went to Rome and joined the colony of American expatriates where they lived ever after. They took on all the vices of that worthless nondescript society and became the first graceless and worldly old women I’d ever seen.’

  But this was not to be Luie’s fate. ‘I hope in Rome someone will take a fancy to me,’ she wrote wistfully. She no longer expected to fall in love and be passionately loved in return – but that is what she still dreamed of and urgently needed. Her mother and aunt understood her need well enough, but they could not speak its name – it seemed as if such natural desires in women were immoral or in any case beyond words. The time had come for Luie to escape from these widowed sisters, neither of whom could deal with what she called her ‘blue and discontented moods’. She had shrewdly observed how ‘a great deal of unexpected pleasures come to me, but no expected ones’. So, when shortly before her nineteenth birthday on 21 June 1883, she met the twenty-seven-year-old Ernest with his eye for pretty girls, she probably entertained no romantic expectations.

  For Ernest this was a year of great sorrow and then happiness. In the spring his eldest and ‘dearest’ sister became seriously ill. ‘She is quite sensible at times and not at others,’ their mother wrote to him; ‘it’s curious how it is mixed up from one hour to another. I wish and pray that the crisis may be over soon and the fever break.’ Ernest replied at once expressing his anxiety both for his sister and over the strain her illness was having on his mother. ‘I suppose doctors can do little. Nursing, nature and God’s good providence can alone save her.’ But the fever mounted and before the end of March 1883, at the age of twenty-three, she died. Her name was Violet.

  That summer Ernest met Luie in Rome. Their courtship, engagement and marriage were threaded through less than five months. ‘Her mother and her aunt saw to it that there shou
ld be no delay, such as a wedding in America,’ one of Luie’s cousins remembered. Each was dazzled by the other. She had finally met someone in Europe who took ‘a fancy to me’. And it was more than a fancy. Ernest felt passionately drawn to her. She thought him a marvellous proper man – but not too proper: he had a few faults, or so she hoped, guessing he may have been rather wild, seen much of the world and probably known temptation. In short, he was the man she had been looking for these last years. Her tears dried up, her blue moods faded away: she was in love. And was she not marrying into the English aristocracy? Her honeymoon was an enchantment and she felt intensely alive. The unattainable had been attained.